Educational Background

Scholarly Interests

Cross-language speech production and perception, communication disorders in bilinguals, accent and intelligibility in speech-language pathology, treatment efficacy in dysarthria due to cerebral palsy and Parkinson Disease

Levy, E. S. (2009). When student clinicians have accents: ASHA’s position and what the research tells us. Metropolitan New York Council of University Clinic Directors in Communication Sciences and Disorders’ Fifth Annual Conference on Supervision: Multicultural/linguistic issues, Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY. (Invited presentation)

Levy, E. S. (2008). Speech-language pathology students with accents: Policies, practices, and sentiments. New York University, Program in Speech and Language Pathology, New York, NY. (Invited presentation)

Centers and Projects

Research

Research in the Speech Production and Perception Laboratory examines speech performance in children and adults in English, French, Mandarin, and Spanish, with special emphasis on the motor speech disorder of dysarthria. Under the direction of Erika S. Levy, Ph.D., Associate Professor and trilingual speech-language pathologist, this lab is affiliated with the Program in Communication Sciences and Disorders in the Department of Biobehavioral Sciences at Teachers College, Columbia University.

Goals

The goals of our research are to better understand patterns of speech production and perception in individuals with various language backgrounds and to develop remediation strategies, when needed, for increasing their intelligibility.

We aim to recreate natural speech patterns as much as possible within the laboratory setting. A theme of this research has been the investigation of utterances in continuous speech, in which neighboring vowels and consonants affect each other’s pronunciation, as opposed to examining speech sounds in isolation. Our work informs educational and therapeutic approaches to speech learning and disorders in multilingual populations.

Current Projects

1. Effects of Speech Systems Intelligibility Treatment (SSIT) (Levy, 2014) on intelligibility in children with spastic dysarthria due to cerebral palsy. We perform intensive, state-of-the-art speech treatment in a fun, camp-like environment for 3 weeks over the summer as part of a randomized controlled trial. (See flyer above.)

4. Effects of two intensive interventions, Respiratory and LSVT-LOUD (Ramig et al., 2001), on the acoustics and intelligibility of Spanish hypokinetic dysarthria due to Parkinson’s disease.

5. Examination of patterns with which early and late Spanish-English bilingual adults assimilate American English vowels into their native vowel inventory and the accuracy with which they discriminate and identify the vowels.